Don’t quit your day job!

Crested Butte 1During the Thanksgiving holiday, my wife Abby, our rescue dog Frankie and I headed to the high country of Crested Butte, CO for three days and three nights of rest and recreation.

To quote Tina Fey from 30 Rock: “I want to go to there.”

What a beautiful town! For this southern California boy, Crested Butte is the perfect embodiment of everything I thought Colorado was supposed to be, with snow-capped peaks, low-key lifestyle, and hiking trails galore. It reminded me what an inspiration John Denver and “Rocky Mountain High” had been in my youth.

Now, 30 years after actually moving to Colorado, I’m thinking I’d like to retire from my chaplain job and live in Crested Butte year-round as an indie-author-playwright-internet marketing entrepreneur. Abby likes the idea, too.

Frankie isn’t talking, but at least he didn’t say “no.”

Then I remembered Jesus’ sage advice about “counting the cost” (Luke 14:28) and the embarrassment that comes from leaping into a project you can’t finish.

So I looked at a few Crested Butte real estate pages. Oh, wow. So that’s what “Rocky Mountain HIGH” REALLY means!

Okay, no problem. All the webinars and podcasts and blogs I’ve been following about living the lucrative life of an indie author/internet marketer assure me that I can easily make five or six figures every month, and I don’t even have to put on pants [pic not available].

No matter that I have already published five Kindle books so far and NONE of them sold a SINGLE COPY in the past month.

By playwright standards, I’m pretty successful. I have 39 published plays, after all. If you divided my 2015 royalty checks into twelve monthly payments, it would add up to about $500/month.

All I have to do is build that up to $12,000 per month, and a work-from-home life in Crested Butte is a real possibility.

Crested Butte 2Okay, not impossible. But not imminent, either.

Besides, I LIKE being a chaplain.

And I’m too young to actually retire.

I’ll give this indie author thing five years. Five years of strategic hard work, planning, learning as much as I can and implementing everything possible.

Produce a lot of content. Build an e-mail list. Come up with a marketing plan and launch calendar for new works. Do guest posts. All of it.

I’m in. All the way.

Because…Crested Butte.

Crested Butte 3


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